Yorkshire Water increases data flow

Bradford, UK - Commercial pressures and environmental regulation together with advances in communications technologies are driving UK water utilities to embrace new approaches to asset monitoring. Their focus now is on upgrading established telemetry systems to provide almost real-time data for applications such as groundwater monitoring, leak detection, equipment surveillance, underground pressure sensings and the flow of water into treatment plant.

Telemetry has long been about monitoring remote field devices, which are linked to a master station/central management system via a variety of communication methods, such as GSM, scanning radio, satellite and GPRS. However, the industry is pushing well beyond the standard use of this technology - picking up data at specific points from a water treatment station network.

As Yorkshire Water's head of telemetry John Parsons explains: "For us in YW, the areas of telemetry and remote monitoring and intervention is looked at from the point of view of corporate IT. Telemetry at YW has always been within the IT structure, and in an increasingly integrated world there is danger it migh t be seen as a bit of a specialist backwater and left to engineers and engineering departments. Making telemetry a mainstream corporate IT activity changes perspectives. You see it very much as corporate data, which you need to collect in a standard way and store in the centre so you can take optimal decisions centrally."

According to Parsons, the telemetry world is "a full, body contact sport," in which engineering and IT must work together and, above that, the buy-in of senior management is essential for it all to work.

Many water companies are rolling out systems to increase the number of parameters they are monitoring. This, said Parsons, is being driven by European regulations, such as the Fresh Water Fish Directive, which has raised the bar on expectations in the wastewater industry.

"The water industry has been driven by clean water regulations for a long time. This area tends to be well covered by control and automation systems," noted Parsons. "The wastewater guys are catching up now and are reaping the benefit, as the technology has moved on so much. They are now utilising technologies such as GSM, Wi-Fi and GPRS, which are now much more widely available than was the case for the clean water business. So there is a bit of leapfrogging going on."

A key target in all areas is for telemetry and related control and automation systems to put engineers in control of what is going in their networks.

"Before, if you had a leak in a clean water distribution network, for example, the field operations spent a lot of time effectively dealing with members of the public, supplying them with bottled water, rather than dealing with the actual problem," said Parsons. "Now that we monitor the network much more, instead of using customers as our telemetry we know we are ahead of the problem and get the guys out there fixing it before the customers have to get in contact. They know, for example, that they have got five to seven hours before the leak actually affects customers."

In the clean water area, Yorkshire Water uses Technolog data loggers, which use GSM and GPRS networks to transfer recorded pressure and flow data, and send alarm messages to a host computer. The system gives 15-minute values on pressure in the network and reports the data back to provide a picture of the network every 30 minutes.

"If anything is going wrong, we can see what is the impact on customers and how much time we have got to get out there and fix it," Parsons explained.

For its wastewater monitoring, Yorkshire Water uses a system called Hawkeye, from IETG. This employs ultrasonic sensor technology to monitor the CSOs (combined sewer overflows) and detect potential pollution incidents through key threshold or overflow levels. Once an incident has been detected, Hawkeye automatically sends an alarm via GSM or GPRS from the affected unit to Yorkshire Water's internal system to instigate corrective measures.

Overall, Parsons said Yorkshire Water is now pushing the limits of currently available monitoring technology, especially in terms of what is possible over mobile phone networks and battery-powered devices, which are optimised to run above ground rather than beneath the manhole covers.

"It is quite a challenge to optimise this for use underground, but is very well worthwhile from our point of view, particularly in terms of enabling us to get ahead of any situation that could impact customers," he said.

One new advance at Yorkshire Water is the RTWRAP system (see panel p24) which looks at the demand forecasts from across the region. This works out which raw water reservoirs the water might come from and where the company is best placed to treat that water and distribute it most cost effectively. Introduced last year, the system has already delivered annual savings of around £1 million a year in power and chemicals.

"With RTWRAP, we have effectively automated 75% of Yorkshire Water's clean water production end-to-end. This process used to take seven days as we had to go and get the data from very remote places, which are far beyond mobile phone network technology," Parsons explained. "The whole process of collecting and reporting it back manually took a week, so we were always a week out of date. Now we can run that process on a daily basis, and every 15 minutes if we really wanted to, so the whole company is optimised every 15 minutes.

The telemetry strategy at Yorkshire Water is based on three planks: expanding the footprint, control & automation and adding intelligence. What we have been doing over the last few years is expanding the footprint quite dramatically and doing major control & automation projects, such as RTWRAP, said Parsons.

"Where we have been expanding the footprint big-time is in going below ground and we are beginning to plug the gaps in an area we did not have much before.

"But the third plank of adding intelligence, we have barely scratched the surface", according to the Yorkshire Water manager. "Telemetry has always been a bit of a point-to-point solution, where the control room operators have had to figure out how what was happening on site A was impacting on site B and, in turn, site C.

"What we are now doing is actually putting in an integrated view of the operations world on a single dashboard so they can now see the implications of what's happening on site A and sites B and C and do comparative analyses. But we have only started to scratch the surface in terms of what we do with this type of intelligence.

This is an interesting space at present, with vendors such as ABB and Siemens trying to push up into the corporate world and big IT companies like IBM pushing down into the control & automation area, continued Parsons.

"There is this battleground in the middle to get the data from all these disparate sources into a telemetry data service and meet all the requirements, whether that is alarm management or whether it is reporting to OFWAT or another regulatory body, or forecasting and modelling," he said. "The ultimate goal for Yorkshire Water is to run the whole company like a single production plant, know we are running in an optimal way, and to be able to remotely reconfigure the company when problems occur.

Having comparative, real-time tracking of the cost of running the different plants displayed on the control video walls at the Bradford HQ is just the start, said Parsons. "The business challenge is to run the company like a production plant and to know that we are running everything in an optimal way and can model the impact of anything that happens. This is a really simple strategy, but one that will take some time to flesh out," he concluded.

Automation across the region


Yorkshire Water has developed a new computer system that enables it to respond to customer demand for water in real time. The system, called RTWRAP (Real Time Water Resource Allocation Plan) automatically distributes the treated water around Yorkshire.

Yorkshire Water supplies around 1.3 billion litres of water every day. RTWRAP monitors rainfall levels and reservoir levels, ensuring that it always knows how much untreated water stock is available. The system automatically works out which are the cheapest sources of water to treat, selects the water treatment works (WTW) to use and tells it how much drinking water it is required to produce.

The WTW then automatically starts to produce the water. As RTWRAP is in constant communication with the WTW, the system can monitor how well the works is performing.

RTWRAP controls all of the critical valves and pumps in Yorkshire; the system is connected to all of them in real time. This ensures drinking water is delivered to customers in the most efficient way by minimising the use of expensive pumps and maximising the use of gravity flow.

If customers begin to demand more water, RTWRAP can automatically increase water production and get that water to the customers as they require it.

According to Yorkshire Water, the technology is helping to minimise power costs and carbon footprint by using gravity whenever possible to transport water supplies, rather than using energy to pump it around the network.

Chemical costs have also been reduced as the system is programmed to search out the cheapest sources of raw water first - i.e. water that requires the least amount of cleaning. RTWRAP also highlights where demand is likely to be higher than usual so action can be taken if necessary to manage supply.